As High St dies, it’s time to build a new main street

Downtown is dying, in America and and now in the UK with news of the collapse of retailers Jessops and HMV. Crikey’s man-at-large writes from London on why it’s time to rethink our city planning.

The long-forecast “death of the High Street” jumped closer today — in the UK at least — with two back-to-back announcements from major chains.

Jessops, the country’s major camera chain, went into administration last week, and died this week, after suppliers and management couldn’t make a deal. The company’s sales were flatlining, at around 230 million pounds pa, carrying 60 million pounds in debt. The 192-store chain closed so fast that those folks who still bring their photos in for developing won’t be able to pick them up — there’s no one there to hand them out.

That was a wobble, but the real hit came today, with HMV — the last CD and DVD retailer on the strip — announcing it was going into administration. The 293-store chain has been in trouble for some time — it issued so many notices it looked like “Profit Warning” was the title of Adele’s next album — and with a 10% fall in December sales, a 1p share price and a 36 million pound loss, it appears suppliers have pulled the plug. Everyone knew it was coming, but most people simply had a mental block about it.

With the passing of HMV goes the record store experience, a habit stretching back decades, across generations — the thrill of discovering music in adolescence. People could take previous collapses — Our Price, Zavvi, Tower Records — as well as other chains like Comet (electronics), Clinton Cards, and JJB, the largest sports retailer. Now everyone is nervously watching Waterstones, the last major book chain — Borders and Books Inc long gone — which reversed out of HMV two years ago, and is maintaining profit but with steadily falling sales, despite a rather desperate deal with Amazon Kindle for an in-store sales arrangement.

Further down the line, whole categories of stores — such as newsagents — are feeling the chill, according to a report by recovery specialists Begbie Traynor. Nor are the empty stores created by these collapses being refilled. In the UK, one in six High Street shops is empty. Since these closures tend to be grouped, the picture is grimmer than the statistics suggest — in poorer places, one in three shop fronts is closed down, causing the street to fall below critical mass, thus driving yet more people away.

But why should the troubles of UK retailers matter to Australians? After all, the US downtown collapsed ages ago and the shockwaves didn’t register. However, there were specific reasons for the US collapse: “white flight” from the cities to the suburbs, high car ownership and huge sweetheart deals with mall developers. The UK High Street should have been more resilient — car ownership is lower, urban density greater, and malls are still the exception rather than the rule.

“Given such an epochal event, we should take it as an opportunity, not an inevitable decline — not merely to refashion urban spaces, but to diminish the centrality of shopping to our lives …”

The fact that it too is dying — and that town centres in places like Italy, with an unparalleled commitment to localism, are in trouble — suggests a brute truth: the High Street in its current form cannot survive anywhere, and there is no point trying to keep it alive in that way. Australia can learn from the mistakes being made elsewhere to prepare for the time when the crunch comes closer to home.

The first lesson might be not to go into denial, as the UK is doing. Here, everything from the wet weather — yes, so unprecedented — to bad management is being blamed for the decline. It’s true that some chains had unforced errors — Jessops went big into digital cameras just as mobile phone cameras became good enough for most needs — but well managed or badly managed they are going under. In the pre-internet days, you couldn’t really lose selling camera stuff or electronics no matter how badly you managed things. These days, no amount of ingenuity would guarantee survival. Not only is online selling taking over, but the very objects once sold — cameras, newspapers and so on — are themselves disappearing. The deep structural changes in our life brought on by the digital revolution have to be understood to be dealt with.

Failing to do so brings on the second error: believing that a bit of ingenuity and lateral thinking within the realm of selling and shopping will work. In the UK, the Cameron government commissioned Mary Portas — a former Harvey Nichols supremo turned brand consultant, and, inevitably, reality TV star — to advise on revitalising the UK High Street. It was the archetypal Cameron move: a PR government hiring a PR person to change the appearance rather than investigate the reality of the situation. Portas came up with 28 recommendations for “revitalising the High Street”: pop-ups, combined shop/cafes, niche branding, blahblah, many of which were perfectly sensible.

But by and large they would only work for one individual High Street, and help it to grab business from other high streets. The report had nothing to say about the wider problem of demand collapse brought about by online retailing, malls, etc. The same was true of another, more searching report by the “Red Tory” think tank Res Publica, which followed in the wake of a “village champion”, Tim Nicoll, who used a Yorkshire community as a laboratory for reversing retail decline. The solution? An artisanal foods industry and, yawn, village branding. The whole thing was part of, yes, a reality show — SOS Village. Thus is Britain governed.So the third and most fundamental error is to believe that there is some magic formula by which that demand could be brought back. Once you abandon that, a set of wider questions can be asked. Why do we need a High Street at all? Why should it be a contiguous line of shops? And why should shopping define the centre of a community anyway? The High Street is, after all, a recent invention. Until the 18th century, villages and neighbourhoods tended to have a far more scattershot and haphazard arrangement. The main street would not necessarily be the High Street, and certainly not the huge line of shops we understand it to be today.

Rising prosperity and a middle class in the 19th century increased the number of people who bought stuff, rather than making it or growing for themselves, or having such done for them. What had been “stores” — repositories that sold things — became “shops”, focused on display and presentation. Arcades were developed. Zoning laws differentiated residential and retail spaces. And until the 1970s, that was how it was.

Then the malls came — ironically Victor Gruen, the inventor of the modern shopping mall, intended it as a multiple civic space, with government offices, schools, apartments, etc, to mimic the feel of European towns, reproduced on the US prairie — and the huge supermarkets. Local councils, often as not bribed with consultancies, if not 50s in a brown bag, gave developers tax breaks, parking waivers and the like, thus stacking the deck against the High Street. But that merely changed the composition of the centre. And then cometh the Amazon.

Given such an epochal event, we should take it as an opportunity, not an inevitable decline — not merely to refashion urban spaces, but to diminish the centrality of shopping to our lives, not least as preparation for the likely shift we will have to make in the way we live in decades to come. To have every community everywhere defined by having a group of shops at its centre is the triumph of bourgeois civilisation, the expression of life as a matter of buying and selling. Now that it has started to break down, we should take the opportunity to refashion the places we live, more radically. We should simply abandon the idea that the high/main street should be a row of shops, and start to see it as a place of multiple uses.

“But essentially life, free activity, has to be returned to the High Street, and that means rethinking social institutions — which are changing anyway.”

The default setting to date, especially in Australia, has been to convert shop fronts to residential use. But while you’d want that as a part of a transformed High Street, it’s that very transformation that makes people desperate to hold onto shops at all cost, because the effect of residentialisation can be so deadening. Nor can it be done with culture alone, in the form of galleries, pop-ups, etc, though that would be part of the new mix. But essentially life, free activity, has to be returned to the High Street, and that means rethinking social institutions — which are changing anyway.

For example, if universities are effectively being decloistered by online learning, why not create study centres in former shops — places where people could gather to work together, use equipment they wouldn’t have at home, etc? The same could be done with the rising number of makerspaces, which have developed out of hackerspaces, and attempt to rejoin manual activity back to mental activity — as equipment banks, places for classes and so on (some of this is highlighted by Marcus Westbury’s Renew Australia project). Small-scale indoor growing would be a further re-orientation.

The ultimate would be the physical reshaping of the centre, with small-scale demolitions — rather than large-scale urban clearing — to reshape and reflow the whole idea of a central street. Rather than replace it with grim pedestrianisation or deathful plazas, these should be working, living spaces — modular urban farms, small sports fields, etc. Whether this sort of thing can be contemplated on a wide scale before a crisis really hits remains to be seen — “the shops” is such a default setting as a centre that there’s not much that would dislodge it until the model fails absolutely. But there is no point in not making a start.

Myself, I will be sorry to watch the inevitable shift. There’s nothing like towns where small shops are still the basic medium of daily life, and the place has a true centrality. Indeed cities like that, where the lost glories of window design is preserved, have a magical feel, something out of the stories and imaginings of childhood. Porto, in Portugal, I recall as making an art of it — a line of stationery shops, climbing up a steep hill, each having created mini-tableaux with the pens, notebooks and office paraphernalia on sale, one having suspended them in a giant floating mobile, another having arranged them in the form of a battle, black and blue, against red and green.

Such efforts are worth more than a hundred public sculptures, a living culture. But they are going, they will all go, and we are no more clued in to what’s next than a little dog listening earnestly to a gramophone.

However, the humble corner shop will survive as humans will always run short of milk, bread, soft drinks et al. There’s no way the consumer will drive several kilometres to a shopping mall then endure the hassle of finding a park just for a litre of milk. Convenience stores are aptly named.

Very interesting. As more purchases go online, the human habitat has renewed possibilities. Our nearest big mall appears to have responded to the challenge by growing even larger… It is huge. It is Hell. This Christmas I managed to completely avoid it and found most gifts and food at an open air market and at our local ‘high street’ which has been newly invigorated by a shop run by some artists (they rent space to other crafts people and run short classes in various old school art/craft/sewing skills). They got the other businesses together and ran a little Christmas fair. A lot of op shops nearby and a community book shop. Many small stalls and the cafe did a roaring trade. The arcade below is home to the local dungeons and dragons fraternity. Woolworths is about to open newly built supermarket nearby… Wonder how that will affect the strip.

I have been thinking about this issue from the other end, the new technologies making ‘telecommuting’or working from home ubiquitous. I presume most will still want a village square in which to socialise, and this could support a reorientation of local activities and facilities that GRundle discusses.

@ zut

I think this phenomenon differs greatly by locale. Almost everywhere in Australia I go the milk bar/dairy has gone. There are ‘convenience stores’ in and around the capital cities, but in vast acres of Australia y’d pick up yer litre of milk at the nearest petrol station, with a ‘candy bar’ for a traveller.

I stop at petrol stations to buy only milk or bread, despite the rip-off prices, more often than I do to buy liquid fossil fuels. The old convenience stores are fading fast and almost gone.

When McJack’s or Hungry Donald’s gets around to putting in a shelf or two of the basics at the back of the McCoffee Bar or in the drive-through, that will be the end of that… not for me, though. I prefer my food edible.

Yep - corner stores are mostly kaput already. The nearest 7/11 - which is a petrol station - covers the milk but there are supermarkets within 1km so during business hours (ie 6 or 8am - midnight) that is where most of the business went.

Yeah, there are convenience stores scattered throughout the Perth CBD which appear to have sprung up to serve the various residential towers that spring up pre-GFC. It’s interesting because both Coles and Woolies have a CBD presence as well - my theory is that people just don’t want to walk that far and driving in the CBD is far too unwieldy.

Interesting article indeed, Guy. Surely there must be someone out there who is putting serious thought into a post-retail high street? Was it something seriously looked at in the utopian urban planning in the UK after the last world war?

JB @ #5 - Milk from a petrol station? That’s desperation, surely. And bread!? Does the bread not adopt a fumey kind of after-taste…? Those bread bags aren’t exactly airtight.
I seriously hope your prediction of the ubiquitous fast-food outlet having a ‘McGeneralStore’ department is a long way from coming to fruition.
I still have a ‘milk bar’ just down the road, and even though I know they buy most of their stock from the central Wesfarmers supermarket, after mark-up they are still cheaper than a petrol station - just.
The logical conclusion, though, is that we’ll all be ordering our consumables, gadgets and accoutrements online, and having them delivered, ready for collection, at the nearest automated co-branded petro-fossil/convenience/’food’ outlet the next time you need unleaded. One store to serve them all…

I just read in the last few days that the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysee is filing bankruptcy pending judgment whether it can survive. Even though one thinks of it as “new” it had become an institution in Paris (even in movies: the “meet cute” point between now-ex-Parisian Johnny Depp and Charlotte Gainsbourg). A wonderful place to browse, and therein lies the problem: many the time I have browsed but cannot really think of any purchases. Perhaps such places should charge a gold coin for entry?

If we look at the Blue Mountains, the towns/suburbs of Leura, Blackheath, Wentworth Falls (NOT Katoomba) have more small shops that sell.. What exactly? Vaguely fashionable fashion things.. Is that a bracelet? Or, or, what? Made in Asia, imported online and then redistributed via pyramid marketing, this stock is generic. How long these shops will last is questionable too.. Interesting: selling the online in the real world - simulacrum.
Pop up, maker spaces. Yeah. Ok, but for how long? Someone owns these properties, and they will subsidize gimmicks that create hype only as long as they create long term tenancy w stable market rental prices. But lets face it they will have to drop and big time. The local will never be able to undercut the global again. And at the moment hospitality is expanding into the gap - but that’s a very different experience of the street. Should we read this change in shop rental trends in relation to the story today about the housing market?..
Hmm.. Call me old fashioned but can I please have my music store and my second hand book shop back please? PLEASE!

Yep, our world is changing rapidly and we hardly notice it until an event like a favourite shop closing forces change upon us.

The rise of the internet has only just begun to show its far reaching effect. I was in woolies the other day and saw the “collect your pre-ordered groceries here” poster.

It is not a nad thing. Just as the shops phenomenon sprung up in response to changing requirements of people a couple of centuries ago, I’m optimistic about the new environment we are creating because the internet is such a marvellous invention.

zut alors The corner shop is being undermined by the threat from the convenience / servo. paddy This information is almost a requiem for the demise of main street business centers. Elbow Patches Like a plant when you cut it back it puts on a growth spurt and flowers. Gavin Moodie I agree I have been pushing my CBD to move toward becoming the eat street of the Woy Woy Peninsula. John Bennets the ubiquitous shopping trollies which permitted super markets to conduct their business on public footpaths were the death of corner stores. zut alors Brisbane CBD A small chain? They are fighting to survive not thriving they are a dying resource. JRER the Blue Mountains towns of Leura, Blackheath, Wentworth Falls the highway and the Bells Line of roads is a long tourist trap. Your information is distressing because it reveals Australians are turning into a nation of quitters only too willing to reach out to the cheap and nasty imports. My town Umina is not well but it has the potential to become the eat street of the Woy Woy Peninsula. For that to happen powerful people with government influence need to stop trying to enrich themselves at the communities expense. I wish my community luck with that! Edward James

David Hand as a commercial property owner here. I have put my money of my CBD becoming an eat street! It is close to the beach and part of a tourist area. disposable incomes and tourist visitors shine a guiding light. while Coles have been here for years Woolworth’s, Aldie and Liquor Land have all moved in within 600 meters of my residence. I believe tourist and locals will always need to eat out. Our local councilors still need to pull their heads out of their,,, if we are to to grow successfully! Edward James

Leichhardt Council in Sydney believes free 30 minute car parking is the answer to Main Street problems. Residents will get their milk and bread from the small shops on Darling St or Norton St etc rather than go to the supermarkets, and maybe do some extra shopping while they are at it. But residents will still go to the supermarkets because price is much lower, so I don’t think this is going to somehow revitalize main streets. Just clog them with more cars.There are still a number of corner stores in the Inner West, away from main streets. Not sure if they get most of their business from car drivers or local foot or bicycle users.

Strips of shops strung along the main road used to work when you could drive into a main suburban centre, park for free and walk around the shops. You can only do that now at shopping malls. In Sydney most corner shops have long gone. So everything is geared to a weekly trip to a shopping mall to buy a trolley-load of groceries. The old strip malls may also have enjoyed passing trade but now you can pass, but not stop, at least not within a bull’s roar. There are a few exceptions, e.g. Artarmon (Sydney North Shore), next to a railway station with lots of high density residential towers within walking distance. It seems to be doing reasonably well.

Of course a weekly shopping trip to a huge mall is also a hassle. Driving to and parking is a nightmare and you can’t walk home or take public transport with 10 bags of groceries. Will the big malls eventually go the way of video hire shops?

Well done Guy. Great conversation stimulator. We at Mainstreet Australia have recognised that main streets, activity centres and local shopping strips have to be so much more than retailing. As you suggest, perhaps the adversity created by the shifts in retailing will provide opportunity for other diverse uses. We will address this at our National Conference in Melbourne.